Once in A Million Lifetimes
by Metronomeblue
Summary: Captain Swan AU drabbles and/or one-shots. Emma/Hook, T for safety.
1. How About A Bakery

How About A Bakery

He orders a vanilla cupcake every day.

Every. Day.

And it's not that regulars are weird or anything, it's just that, well... He doesn't look like a vanilla guy. Guyliner, leather jacket, head-to-toe black. Not to mention the earring. Nothing about the Irishman says 'vanilla'.

Tequila-lemon dipped in chocolate, maybe, but not vanilla.

So yeah, Emma's a little bit curious now.

And no, it has nothing to do with the blue eyes or the ruffled hair or the... accent.

It's just weird, and Emma was bored the minute she poured her fifth cup of coffee the morning she started this job.

So when he comes in, smirk settled temptingly on his lips and hands shoved carelessly in his pockets, she's just bursting with curiosity. He opens his mouth to order, as usual, and she just can't help herself.

"Why vanilla?" She asks suddenly, and she wants to clap her hands over her mouth, stop sound from leaving her ever again, because he smiles, wide and knowing and smug... and ignores her question.

"Blackberry muffin, please." And now this is just weird, because he's changed his order. None of the regulars have ever changed their order. Not ever. She tilts her head, mouth hanging a bit open, and he laughs.

And it's nice.

And she huffs, more than a bit embarrassed and very, very curious, because he still hasn't answered her question. She hands him the muffin awkwardly, practically shoving it at him from across the counter.

She's not usually at a loss for words, so Ruby quirks an eyebrow at her as he leaves, muffin in hand and smile still set in his face. Emma shakes her head, fuming and fighting a smile.

The next day is the same. Sort of.

She asks him what his name is, and that smile comes up again. He reaches out a hand to shake, and she takes it warily.

"Killian Jones," he grins, and feeling challenged, she shoots him a matching smirk.

"Emma Swan," and then, sensing an opportunity, "Why the muffin?"

He orders a piece of carrot cake.

The day after that she's prepared. She baked a round of carrot cake that morning, fresh and hot. When he comes in, she lays down a slice in front of him before he even reaches the counter. He looks down, a fond smile playing with the edges of his mouth. He looks back up at her, meeting her eyes with an innocent, breezy smile.

"Maple scone, please." She wants to slump down and bang her head against the counter. She also wants to punch him. In the face. With her face.

She gives it to him, and he breaks it in half later to find a piece of paper stuffed into it.

WHY VANILLA CUPCAKES?

He laughs and folds it up, hiding it in his pocket.

Ruby begins calling him her future husband. Emma hits her with a dish towel.

Every day for three months he manages to find something different to order. A banana muffin, peanut butter cupcake, chocolate torte, huckleberry danish. Until eventually he has to loop around and start off the list again.

Emma is not prepared for three more months of this insanity.

"What do I have to do to make you stop?" She eventually sighs, handing over an onion-parmesan bagel.

He smiles, the same way he does every day, and this time he turns back, leans over the counter like he's going to talk to her. Like he's flirting.

"Go out with me. Today." His tone warps the words, making what could have been sleazy or lazy pleading and hesitant instead. "Please."

She stands for a moment, eyes flicking over his face as though checking he's serious.

"Yeah?" Her voice trembles a bit, and his smile softens, from confident ladykiller to shy bookworm.

"Yeah." Emma notices she's been twisting the dishrag between her hands for the duration of the conversation and she puts it down.

"Okay." She swallows, smiling. "Where?"

"No 'why'?" He smiles back.

"I've learned, you see." She laughs, taking off her apron. "That one doesn't work with you."

"Ah, of course." She steps around the counter and he proffers his arm. "Milady."

"Milady my ass," she snorts. "I'm just Emma."

"Emma." Her name is sunshine off his tongue. "Emma." He nods, and they walk.

It's a lovely date, actually. They eat lemon angel food cake on the grass in Central Park, and there aren't even bugs.

It's a nice change from the last few whiskey-fueled one-night stands Emma has substituted for 'dates'.

The next day she finds herself anticipating his arrival. She realizes she's been doing that for three months. How odd.

"Coconut pound cake, please." She rolls her eyes and they both laugh. "Still not asking why?"

"Never again," she chuckles, resigned. "'Why' doesn't even sound like a word anymore."

"Would you like me to tell you?" He asked, leaning over the counter on his clasped hands. Emma leans against the pastry case and nods, amused by this turn of events. Ruby is watching hungrily from around the supply closet.

"Of course," Emma scoffs. "Was three and a half months not enough to show you the lack of mysteries in my life?" He chuckles.

"The first day I came into town, I saw this place. You were on a break, I suppose, and you were eating a vanilla cupcake." He smiled fondly, lost in thought. "You said they were your favorite. I came in, to get away from the heat, and when I ordered one you smiled. I was a bit nervous, you know, new in town, so I didn't have the courage to ask you out then, and the cake was so good I came back the next day. I ordered the same thing, and you smiled again. I think I just wanted to see you smile." Emma smiles, trying to imagine Killian shy.

"You're kind of a creeper, you know that?" He looks suitably offended, and begins to protest, but she cuts him off with a kiss.

"Why did you stop?" He asks, disgruntled, after she breaks away.

"Finish your story, creeper man, and then we can kiss." Emma pulls herself onto the edge of the counter, swinging her legs around so she's next to him. Killian raises an eyebrow, and she grins. "So why the changing order?"

"You stopped smiling." He looks nervously at his hands. "I thought it would be a way to get to know you, maybe surprise you into smiling."

Emma smiles.

Then she kisses him.

He smiles into the kiss, and they're both grinning like fools, kissing and smiling and laughing.

And Ruby gives them the picture of that kiss on their wedding day.

Emma smacks her with a napkin. 


	2. Saviour

Saviour

Killian Jones is the Saviour. It's been known for the last year that he'll save them all, this tiny child.

Snow and Charming are crying, hearts breaking as they're ripped from their child.

Emma watches quietly, biting her lip.

"I hope you're brave, kid." She whispers. "You're gonna have to be."

Twenty-eight years later, nothing had changed.

Mary-Margaret walking to work, sweet and quiet and lonely. David Nolan in a coma, unknowing and forgettable and alone. Regina Mills in charge, iron and smugness and apples and loneliness. Graham Humbert, Sheriff and sweetheart and lonely. Emma Swan, deputy and workaholic and lonely.

Storybrooke was loneliness clothed in bright lights and wood and work.

And then Henry, sweet, intrepid, clever Henry, who ran down to the Sheriff's station after school to visit Emma. Henry who aged when no-one else did. Emma noticed it. She noticed every day, and every night she forgot.

Because Storybrooke was forgetting clothed in overworking and oversleeping and overthinking.

And everything was the same every day, everything was static and frozen and wrong, so wrong. And nobody noticed, nothing changed, nobody aged or lived or died.

Because Strorybrooke was time, locked in a day of routine movement.

And then Henry disappeared, and the whole town went frantic, searching everywhere, everywhere and not finding him.

And the search was still going in the morning.

Because Storybrooke was a family, a town united by love for one little boy, pity for one worried mother, desperate searching for a lost child.

But Henry came back, seated happily in the backseat of a lemon-yellow Volkswagon Beetle. And Emma was as happy as (happier than) anyone else to see henry back safe and sound, but it was the driver of the car who caught her eye.

"Sweet boy, wouldn't you say?" Graham was standing behind her, and she turned, looking up at him questioningly, but when she looked back the driver was out of the car.

And he was different. The air around him seemed to move more quickly than anywhere else, and his leather jacket caught the light more deftly than her own. He was just... a few seconds faster than everything else in Storybrooke.

Because Storybrooke was slow, sluggish, frozen.

And that night, lying in her bed, Emma heard a scraping, a creaking, and when she went up to her window to look she found the time had changed. The clock, perpetually stuck at 8:15, had moved. Emma smiled, wide and brilliant and real for the first time in twenty-eight years.

Because Storybrooke was changing.

The next day, Emma remembered. Time moved forward, and she was almost willingly taken out to sea in the tidal wave of action that followed the clock's signal.

Killian Jones, the stranger said his name was, and that he was Henry's father, and that he was just in town for a week, staying at Granny's.

Emma was stricken by his eyes though. They were so familiar, more familiar than his name, and his name slid off her tongue like butter into chocolate.

They were blue, like oceans and skies and the sheen off the edge of soap bubbles.

Blue like lightning.

Graham died a few months later, and Killian held her as she cried. Her best friend was gone, and when Regina patted her shoulder she almost strangled the woman.

Because Storybrooke was waking up.

She made Killian her deputy. Regina tried to talk her out of it, but was quickly silenced by a look from Emma's portfolio of 'Shut Up Stares'.

Then those two children were found, and Killian convinced her to help them, noting with a soft kind of sympathy that, "You've been abandoned as well."

And she began to think maybe there was more to this than she previously thought.

Because Storybrooke wasn't the same.

And then August came, mysterious and a bit alike to Killian and a fair amount too interested in Henry.

And when Killian helped her hunt down evidence of Regina's possible corruption, there was a moment, just one, when their hands brushed, and she could have sworn time stopped. Not in the way it had before, when Killian hadn't been there, but in the way when you want that one moment to freeze, to keep forvever, and you want it so hard that it almost works.

And Mr. Gold beat a burglar half to death with his cane, and Killian caught regina holding something over on him in the jail cell.

And Emma sort of kind of wished her Valentine's Day could still be spent with Killian, just with less crime and blackmail.

And then, Mary-Maragret and David's affair came out, Kathryn went missing and soon she and Killian were Mary-Margaret's only friends. And Emma found herself arresting David, and Killian was there to assure her they'd prove her friend's innocence.

And taking on Ruby as their assisstant was a better decision than either of them had thought, but a more grim benefit was soon revealed when she found what seemed to be Kathryn's heart. It was Killian who had told Mary-Margaret about the fingerprints on the box because Emma couldn't do it.

And as the case against Mary-Margaret became more thorough and more undeniable, it was Killian who took extra paperwork to give her more time to investigate, to try and prove her friend innocent.

And it was Killian who called her in the middle of the night to tell her Mary-Margaret was gone. And during the whole spectacle with Jefferson, and the hearing in the morning, Killian was there.

And when Kathryn came back, and Mr. Gold thought August was his son, it was Killian who dealt with the routine duties so Emma could straighten things out. And that night when they ate dinner together, even if it was in the office over paperwork, it still felt a bit like a date to Emma.

And when August tracked down Killian, took him to the woods to show him his past, it was Emma he came to afterward, and that night as they talked over pie from Granny's, she realized she'd be lost without him.

Because Storybrooke was impossible without him.

And when Killian decided to leave Storybrooke, to come back only every now and then, it was Emma he went to to say goodbye. She only began to cry after she closed the door.

And when Henry was in the hospital it was Emma who never left his side, who guarded him while Killian did his utmost to save him. Because even if Emma would rather be fighting with him, it was more important somebody made sure Henry was alright, or if not alright at least alive.

And when he began to flatline, it was Emma who held Killian as he began to cry. She ran a hand through his hair and thought of all the things he was never going to do with his son.

And when Henry was alive again, Killian's tears still wet on his cheek, it was Emma who swept down upon him and hugged him within an inch of his life.

And when Killian kissed her, the rainbow arc of light and warmth and love that flowed througgh her was worth twenty-eight years of oblivion and repetition. Every minute of it was worth this. Every memory that flared up inside her paled in comparison to this. Henry alive, Killian holding her close, the curse broken.

Because Storybrooke was alive again.

Because she was alive again. 


End file.
